Tratado da Virtuosa Benfeitoria (1433)

Infante Dom Pedro

From Silverberg (226-7):

Pedro’s active career and tragic end stirred the European imagination: to those outside Portugal, knowing no details of the domestic political struggle, his downfall seemed like the toppling of a mythic hero, and swiftly the mythmaking began. His deeds were rehearsed by historians, they were dramatized by poets, and they passed into the oral tradition as folk legends. The aspect of Dom Pedro’s life that received the greatest embellishment was his grand tour of 1425-28, which became not merely a conventional trot through the capitals of Europe but, in some retellings, a splendid journey to the ends of the earth. The Book of the Infante Dom Pedro was the climactic work of this group.

Its author is unknown, though there is some internal evidence that he was a priest. The book purports to be “written by Garci Ramirez de Santisteban, one of the twelve who traveled with said prince,” but since Dom Pedro did not in fact visit most of the places described by Garci Ramirez, it is clear that this ascription is merely a literary device. Though the publication of the work in printed form dated to 1515, it evidently circulated widely in manuscript for some time prior to that, perhaps for ten or even twenty years.

The world of the Book of the Infante Dom Pedro is the familiar medieval fantasy world already well explored in the fancies of such writers as Mandeville. Beyond Christendom lies the Moslem world, and on the far side of that is a world of fables, inhabited by Amazons, the Lost Tribes of Israel, and Prester John… All the remote lands save Eden itself are under the sovereignty of Prester John, who here is as much a figure of legend as he ever was in the twelfth or thirteenth century. The author’s intent seems utopian and ecumenical; he implicitly criticizes the disunified world of Latin Christendom by showing the ideal community of Prester John’s land, where command of church and state is united in the person of the same benevolent autarch, and Christian justice and harmony are  universally prevalent” (226-7).

Read the account in English.